The Week of House Shopping‏

On this week's episode of Sister Cale in Columbus-the Sisters went to
Zone Conference (it was awesome, even if they did install babysitters
into our cars-Big Brother is literally watching now and gives warnings
if you don't drive according to his liking), Sister Cale hit her seven
month mark (WHAA???), the Sisters got to be a diversion for a surprise
birthday party, they met a lot of really nice people (most of whom
were not particularly interested in learning more about the
Restoration than what the Sisters had shared, but that's cool
#agency), and the Sisters spoke in sacrament meeting.

Hey Lovely Humans!

What a strange, hard, and yet somehow lovely week it has been. It's
funny to me that even when I'm in the middle of a week and it feels
like the hardest thing ever, I get to Monday's and e-mailing and I
realize just how blessed the week has been. I'm starting to learn to
recognize that God's plans for what he needs us to accomplish, and our
plans for what we want to accomplish are often not entirely aligned. I
think it is miraculous that God manages to get us where he needs us to
be when we sometimes have different ideas about what's supposed to be
happening.

A prime example of this happened Thursday morning when we started
knocking doors on Essex in the Oxford neighborhood (sometimes you pick
places to go because the streets have good names). So we knocked...and
we knocked...and we knocked...and fifteen doors later no one had
answered and we had finished the whole side of the street. It was time
for us to head back to the apartment for lunch and we were both
feeling pretty confused as to why we had felt like we should come and
knock on this specific street that morning. As we walked to our car
there was a girl sitting out in the road in front of her vehicle. We
walked by, then both of us stopped and we started to talk to her. She
was having a rough day and we were able to have an awesome
conversation with her about the Book of Mormon and the way that it can
bring us peace during hard times. If you had asked us that morning
what we were going to do on that street, we would have told you that
we were going to talk to the Oxford Mom's and attempt to find new
investigators. Neither of us would have guessed that we were supposed
to be there to talk to a girl who was going to be sitting in the road
in front of her truck. I would venture that that was precisely
Heavenly Father's purpose in directing us to that neighborhood though.

My new favorite contacting game is to go house shopping as you walk
around neighborhoods. Ohio has a lot of interesting and beautiful
houses. Sister Gordon and I have started picking out features that we
like from the houses and taking pictures of them. It's kind of a fun
way to mix the time up.

We had some really awesome missionary meetings this week. Zone
Conference was some kind of crazy because it was the gathering of
three zones as opposed to just two like normal, because the missionary
department was there installing the tiwi devices. The devices are
basic operant conditioning, that will hypothetically eventually lead
to safer driver from the missionaries. It's hard not to feel a little
micromanaged, but I trust that the missionary board knows what they're
doing and I can just be grateful that I'm not the driver right now.

The coolest part of Zone Conference was our conversation about the
relationship between faith, the Atonement, our covenants and power.
President Daines talked about how Heavenly Father wants to give his
children all power, and that we begin to access that power as we make
covenants which allow us to have greater connections to heaven. We
talked about how miracles are only worked by the faith of the people
and that a lack of miracles does not mean that God has changed, simply
that his children aren't showing the required faith to allow him to
work in their lives. An aspect of this that I found to be most
interesting was the concept that God won't interfere without someone
showing faith because that would interfere with our agency. President
Daines said that a miracle truly is something that we do that is
beyond our own capacity, though we often use the term tender mercy to
save the superlative of miracle for the really big tender mercies. So
cool!

Sister Gordon and I spoke in Sacrament Meeting yesterday. My topic was
hungering and thirsting after righteousness through obedience. I
talked about Kohlberg's Moral Reasoning, created my own obedience
ladder, and used the scriptures. I'll send an e-mail with my talk
(because for once in my life it's really written out (I needed to be
able to time it and make sure I was roughly around twenty minutes))
but I don't expect you to read it. You can if you want though.

The church is true, life is good, God's in charge, and Satan hates you!

Love,

Jessica